Renovations in Woolwich

Renovation in Woolwich divides cleanly between two kinds of building. Up the hill from the town centre run streets of Victorian terraces with solid nine inch walls, bay fronts, closet wings and suspended timber floors, most of them well past a hundred years old. Down by the river, the Royal Arsenal's conversion has produced apartments in a mixture of restored historic buildings and new construction. The same request, a better kitchen and a more open ground floor, means completely different work depending on which side of General Gordon Square you happen to live.

Victorian terraces above the town centre

A terrace of this era has a predictable anatomy and predictable faults. The rear closet wing leaves a narrow side return that most owners eventually want filled in. Solid brick walls have no cavity, so they lose heat and can carry damp inward where ground levels have risen against them. Suspended timber ground floors need their underfloor ventilation kept clear, and it rarely is. Lath and plaster ceilings crack and get overboarded rather than replaced. All of it turns up once the finishes come off. The survey is where these things surface, not the second week of the build.

Opening the ground floor up is the change that transforms these houses, and it needs designing properly. The wall between front and rear rooms carries floor loads and often part of a chimney stack, so the load path is assessed by an engineer we bring in and the beam and padstones come from their calculations. Our part is installation: propping, staged demolition, seating the steel and leaving the bearings open for building control. Where a bearing lands in the shared wall, the work becomes notifiable under the Party Wall Act and the notice has to reach the neighbour first.

Arsenal apartments and managed buildings

An apartment at the Royal Arsenal is a different job in every respect. The building is managed, the flat is leasehold, and structural or layout changes need the freeholder's written consent before the design is finalised. Construction is typically concrete or steel frame with non structural partitions, which sounds simpler than it is: what looks like a stud wall may be concealing a column, a riser or part of a structural core, and the building's own drawings and the management rules both need consulting before anything is cut. Cutting first and asking afterwards is not an option in a frame building.

Management rules govern the rest. Working hours, lift bookings, loading bay access, dust containment and where waste can be staged are set by the building rather than by the site. Corridors and lifts get protected before the first delivery. We supply the insurance details and method statement the management company asks for, and you get one named project manager who deals with them so you are not doing it from your desk. It adds lead time, not difficulty. Booking the lift and the loading bay weeks ahead is part of the programme rather than an afterthought.

Sequencing a whole house refurbishment

Most Victorian houses in SE18 have been improved in patches over decades, which leaves an odd mixture: a new bathroom, original wiring, a rewire that stopped at the first floor, a boiler squeezed into what used to be an airing cupboard. A full renovation is worth doing precisely because it brings the whole building to one standard in one sequence. Structure, then first fix electrics and plumbing, then plaster, then kitchen, bathroom, second fix and decoration, with inspections at each stage rather than all at the end. Following that order is what stops one trade undoing the work of another.

Living arrangements have to be decided honestly too. A full refurbishment in an occupied terrace can be phased, but it is slower and dustier than moving out for the noisy stage, and we say which yours needs at quotation stage rather than in week three. Waste, deliveries and a skip permit all have to be arranged around a street with controlled parking and no rear access to most of these terraces, and that gets planned before a start date is confirmed. Certainty about those arrangements is worth more to most households than an optimistic start date.

Where most Woolwich projects start: whole-house refurbishment in Woolwich, everything we cover across Greenwich, renovations in Eltham, renovations in Charlton and how to plan a renovation.